


He (should) care

by squireofgeekdom



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Background/Supporting characters, Character Study, Depression, Gen, James "Bucky" Barnes - Freeform, Medication, Natasha Romanoff - Freeform, Steve Rogers-centric, Therapy, sam wilson - Freeform, tony stark - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-19 05:21:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8191699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squireofgeekdom/pseuds/squireofgeekdom
Summary: Two studies of Steve Rogers living with depression, through bad times and good.





	

He should care about Sam.

 

Sam is  _ good _ , god, so good, and honest, and listens, and sees through his cracks even when they’re plastered over and covered with flags, and brave and  _ good  _ and Steve is sure that he would jump off a building again to save Sam’s life, so in some abstract way he must care about him, right? He should feel something when he looks at Sam, feel something warm and happy and loving, and he doesn’t. He can feel the edges of it, he knows where it should be, what the void where it should be looks like, feels those edges in the moments Sam makes him smile, or laugh. But when he looks past there’s nothing but emptiness that he doesn’t know how to fill. 

 

He should care about Bucky. 

 

He remembers caring about Bucky, remembers with a vague sense of unreality that he keeps trying frantically to scrape away, scratching and burrowing until he can almost feel it again. Some part of him thinks he keeps chasing Bucky in the hopes that he’ll feel the same way again, in new memories, that Bucky can drag the Steve-Rogers-who-cared back from the second world war and into the twenty first century - though sometimes he’s not sure if the Steve Rogers who cared had really survived the second world war, anyway, any more than the Bucky he cared about had. 

 

He should care about Natasha.

 

He doesn’t know when he realized that Natasha cared more about him than he did about her. Now the thought of times when he didn’t know if Natasha cared about him at all, as any more than an ally or asset, when he couldn’t have been sure of what was genuine banter and what was a front or manipulation  - those memories feel as unreal as memories of times he cared. She cares so much, and he wonders if it’s as much a surprise to her as it is to him. Probably more. At some point, he realized that she had chosen the Avengers as her family, and he - he hadn’t.

 

He should care about Tony. 

 

God, he should care about Tony. Tony - Tony tries so goddamned hard sometimes, and it feels like he’s showing off but at some point Steve realized that he’d picked them for family, before Natasha, before any of them. He should care about Tony, but the only thing he feels when he scrapes at the hollow places is anger, for every moment that Tony’s voice edges on sounding like Howard but isn’t, for reminding him that he should be the Steve Rogers that cared but isn’t.  He shouldn’t feel that, that’s the worst reason to be angry at Tony but the anger seems to be the one thing he can still feel - and that shouldn’t surprise him, it was always the strongest one - so he keeps mining for it. He’s almost grateful any time Tony gives him better reasons to be angry, any time the twenty-first century lets him down - because for all that it’s better, there’s still plenty of things to be angry about, and he’s grateful to be allowed to feel angry without the heavy void where guilt should be, because anger is  _ something _ . Not a void. Anger is leverage to push himself forward.

 

Someday anger won’t be what’s pushing him forward. Someday his life won’t feel like a long series of things he  _ should _ care about.

 

The thoughts carry the same sense of unreality as the memories of times he did care.

 

He squeezes off a grin at Natasha, and takes the plunge from the quinjet.

 

\---

 

And yet.

 

It turns out to be true. 'Someday' turns out to be real, it must have, because at one point he turned around and realized that he’d been happy for a while. Been caring for a while. He turned around and Jim was teasing Tony about something ridiculous from their college days, making Carol laugh and Bucky grin, and Natasha smirked from the doorway, hands wrapped around a mug of coffee, and Sam came in and asked if they were excited about the Star Wars premiere that night and he smiles and says yes, of course, and none of it feels unreal.

 

He cares about Sam.

 

He cares about Sam when he tries to make Sam laugh on the way to therapy sessions (Sam drives,  because “Holy fuck, dude, I am never letting you behind the wheel again, where the hell did you learn to - no, no, I know the answer to that, do  _ not  _ answer that.”) telling stories Sam had missed from training sessions with Kamala and Peter, or the latest mischief Carol’s cat Chewie had gotten into.  He cares about Sam when Sam has a bad day of counselling and it feels like the two steps backward after the one step forwards, and all he can do is be there and hold on to Sam, and the holding on feels like it’s filling up the hollow places.

 

He cares about James.

 

James, not Bucky, James had decided in the process of trying to build something out of the pieces he had been left with, not going by the old nickname a way to move forward, to acknowledge that he wouldn’t ever be the man from before the Winter Soldier again. It’s still hard for Steve, especially when James makes the same old jokes, or brings up a shared memory that came back to him and Steve smiles and feels whole, but he’ll call him James as long as that’s what he wants to be called - much to James Rhodes’ consternation, and Steve laughs every time someone uses the name “James” and they both turn around, and the laughter doesn’t feel hollow.

 

He cares about Natasha.

 

This comes to him when they’re curled up together on the couch in the living room, in the dark watching Star Trek reruns at three in the morning, after they’d both woken up from nightmares and wandered into the kitchen, and it hits him that the warmth he’s feeling isn’t just from the hot cocoa. She falls asleep tucked under his arm, and Steve finds that kind of trust, not just to save your life but to be there for the nightmares, that kind of trust feels like family. Feels real, and whole.

 

He cares about Tony.

 

God, Tony never stops trying. He sets the pill reminder alarm on Steve’s Stark phone to about five different songs in a week, and he always toasts Steve whenever their alarms go off at the same time, shooting off a “Better living through chemistry, right?” before they down their meds. He’ll tease Steve about using journals to record the good moments - the moments when he’s happy, when he cares - instead of putting holo-videos together in an interactive memory vault like he does, but Steve always finds new journals in his room when he starts to get to the last pages, and Friday always prompts him to look at his journals whenever he can’t seem to leave his room, and when Tony drops by with food  - “Missed you at dinner, Steve -” he can’t even seem to feel angry.

 

And there’s a voice in the back of his head that says that this can’t last, that every place that feels solid is going to melt away like so much ice, and he’ll be left feeling hollow again. And it’s right - there are hours, days, weeks where getting through mundane Avengers tasks feels like treading through mud, and the  _ caring _ that normally pulls him out of bed feel distant and unreal. 

 

It isn’t though. It always comes back to him, and he knows that even when he struggles to believe it. And the days when it does come back, when he cares about these people, his family, so much it almost burns - those days? 

 

Those days are worth it.


End file.
